Fascinated by the Nazarene but unimpressed by religion!

The Inner Void – revisited

Recent tragic events that are crashing around us like battered waves on a rocky shoreline, are causing us to wonder where God is to be found. Has he dozed off and let the world system go its merry but paradoxically angst filled way? Religious folk did deeper into their ‘certainty of belief’ bomb shelters, believing the end is nigh and suspecting that the Mayans may have been right after all.

Many are just confused with a deep sense of unease that something is shifting in the affairs of man – a shaking that’s reducing our modern Babel Towers to rubble.

Does the God of Yeshua care and if so why can’t He come to us in our darkness? Serious questions for serious times.

In light of such confusion I’ve decided to repost my article ~ The Inner Void hoping that it can help and encourage us in our search for the Divine dwelling place. May it bless and enlighten you on the Journey.

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One of the strangest rooms in the history of religious experience was the Jewish ‘Holy of Holies’. At first a portable enclosed cube of space, 30 feet by 30 feet by 30 feet, within the skin tented Tabernacle, it was later incorporated as the focal point of Solomon’s First Temple in Jerusalem.

What was this room all about and has it anything to teach us in our 21st century search for the Divine?

The surprising fact about the holy cube is that it was sparsely furnished. In the Solomon Temple it housed the famous Ark of the Covenant, a gold lined box containing the Torah tablets as received by the Jewish leader Moses. The golden top of the Ark was known as the mercy-seat where the Divine Presence took up residence whenever He wished. The furnishings were completed with Aaron’s miraculously flowering rod and a jar of manna, representing the Jewish deliverance from Egyptian slavery and the ‘Bread of Life’ that had kept them alive in their nomadic wanderings.

Significantly in the later Second Temple the Holy of Holies was just an empty room, following the disappearance of The Ark and other religious artifacts during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem.

It was also fairly small and, perhaps most significantly, dark. And yet this was where the Jewish High Priest entered only once a year, on the Day of Atonement, to meet their God YAHWEH; a meeting with the Divine in a darkened space, lit only by the Shekhinah manifestation of Presence.

May we, in our own emptiness and inner darkness be likened to such a holy room? I believe so. When our lives have emptied of all superficiality through a descent into confusion and despair, when we are alone in the seeming singularity of our inner humanity, when love seems far away and human or religious trust completely non-existent, what is left? Nothing or Ultimate Reality?

In this void within the human heart is their not a space for Divine Love to meet us on our own Day of Atonement, our appointed Day of Sacred Oneness? Does not a Shekhinah Presence come and surprise us in our isolation, causing us, like the High Priest to fall on our faces in awe? So transforming a Presence that our faces shine with Spirit, like that of Moses, after our encounter in desert solitude.

Where do we encounter such Divinity if it can be experienced at all? It’s certainly not experienced in the mind where conceptual truth is mistakenly worshipped as Ultimate Reality. Many followers of Yeshua fall short of their birthright by settling for doctrinal knowledge, a pale shadow of Divine Presence. Theologians and philosophers frantically search through the conceptual maze hoping to nail such a Presence down, straightjacketing it in their chains of religious theory.

Fortunately Divine Spirit easily avoids the vain clutches of such academics to meet the common man in his inner chamber, the ‘I’ room designed for such an encounter. As our false survival selves crumble, their social and material supports tumbling into extinction, a door opens into the darkness of our confusion, where we stand stripped naked of self-assurance and ego.

Here we wait, often in despair for the Divine Light, the comfort of our Creator Parent, our Source, the very stuff from whence we have come. Thankfully such a Light will appear as surely as day follows night but only when darkness has carried out its liberating execution of our enslaving ego. Only then will all make sense; when spirit embraces Spirit and we are One.

So, on our journey into the unknown, let’s not be afraid of our inner world, our Divine meeting place, for to such a place we will return on our parting breath. Better to get familiar with it now I reckon.

I do wonder where God is externally. What is he up to in the outer world? What will happen when everything crumbles and falls -every system that the god of this world has in place?

Yes, indeed there is a great shaking going on – “a shaking that’s reducing our modern Babel Towers to rubble.” I see all but Truth burning to ashes, which leaves me at a loss in knowing how to pray during these troubled times.

Oh, what a Divine message Dylan. When I read something with such depth, I rejoice in knowing there are others who dwell in the secret place, or the Holy of Holies. It might be our only hope. I don’t know. IS this our only hope? I find it increasingly hard to reconcile myself to hope in the outer world.

I also often wonder where god has gone, and where he hangs out because many times on a personal level I’ve needed him, and still I’ve felt alone but, a deeper, inner part of my being… despite his absence, knows there is something, a reason, a knowledge that he knows best… Please don’t ask where this instinct springs from, I’m not sure… I just know it to be, and that’s helped in my own shaky uncertainty.

A further surprising, powerful support has been finding people such as you; it’s further shown me answers to important but quiet questions, which have stayed within due to past uncertainty or confusion. I do however warmly embrace your description of seeing the light that will appear one day, and I pray I’ll be liberated, ready to make sense of it all. The path I tread now is so much closer to him ~ then a path I once walked, so for now I am content to just wait and see…

A most beautiful and touching comment regarding your own journey and the sense that Divine Love is somewhere so deep within that there too it seems unknowable. Yet as you say it is there, like an anchor point that holds us in the deepest and most painful experiences of life. Today God feels far from me but I say to myself ‘That’s OK’ for the Sacred Ocean ebbs and flows upon the beach of my consciousness. Spirit will touch me again as surely as day follows night – it’s in His nature.

I’m so glad my writing helps you on the way – we are beacons to one another when darkness falls. May Presence rest upon you and yours in the days ahead my dear friend.

I am never disappointed when I take the time to read what you’ve written. I am particularly struck by these lines: “When our lives have emptied of all superficiality through a descent into confusion and despair, when we are alone in the seeming singularity of our inner humanity, when love seems far away and human or religious trust completely non-existent, what is left? Nothing or Ultimate Reality?”

I feel like I have been at a point of complete despair, not knowing if there was a God and if there was, did he hate me for something I’d done?

Still, I persisted with nothing but a thread of the garment of faith hoping that someday it would all come to light.

I can feel the changes, I believe that we are destined for a period of world history unlike any other and that everything we cling to will be torn from us, lest we willingly just let go. If we cling too tightly, we will be consumed by the wave of destruction that will make all things new.

Yes it’s hard to describe real despair to those who haven’t been there – enveloped by darkness at the bottom of a deep well is the best picture that comes to mind from my own experience. It appears that our body, psyche and even our spirit have conspired against us by their apparent numbness. Yet, in truth what we are experiencing is the death of the ego and a chink of Light will come, imparting Life once again. A new morning begins with a new dawn and such it is within – like being born all over again.

I delight to hear that the Light is carrying you into a new or perhaps more accurately preplanned future. Ours is just to stay on the raft and let Spirit take us where He wills; a place of restoration, peace and above all freedom.